Hanging by a Thread Read Free Page A

original orders, I should be able to figure it out.
    In theory.
    Long red nails a blur at her calculator, Angelique, the bookkeeper du jour, doesn’t even glance over. “Thought you’d like that,” she says in her Jamaican accent. Nikki is nothing if not an equal-opportunity employer. In the past three months, we’ve had one Italian, one Chinese, and two Jewish bookkeepers of various genders and sexual orientations. And now Angelique, who I give two more weeks, tops. Especially as her crankiness indicators have been rising quite nicely over the past few days. It takes a special person to work here. Sane people need not apply.
    â€œNikky said to tell you Harry needs these ASAP so he can figure out the cutting schedules and get them to the subs.”
    The subcontractors. Better known as the sweatshops thatpermeate the relentlessly drab real estate over on 10th and 11th Avenues, filled with seamstresses who speak a dozen different languages, none of which happen to be English. Skirts that retail for two-four-eight-hundred bucks, cut out by the dozens by powersaws on fifty-foot long cutting tables, stitched together by industrial sewing machines that sound like 747 engines, for which the sub gets a few bucks a skirt. Which is not what the seamstresses get, believe me. But hey—Nikky can say her products are American-made.
    Of course, I can’t sit at my ersatz desk because my chair is piled with samples dumped there by God-knows-who. So I gather them up—from the current fall line, we’re all sick to death of them—and haul them back to the showroom, thinking maybe I should straighten out the showroom before Sally, Nikki’s saleswoman, sees it.
    â€œ Je -sus!”
    Too late.
    I shoulder my way through the swinging door, my arms full, to be greeted by large, horrified blue eyes. Sally Baines is the epitome of elegant, with her softly waved, ash-blond hair and her restrained makeup. Today our lovely, slim, fiftyish Sally is tastefully attired, as usual, in Nikki’s (cough) designs—a creamy silk blouse tucked into a challis skirt in navy and dark green and cranberry paisley, a matching shawl draped artfully over her shoulders and caught with a gold and pearl pin.
    â€œAn hour, I was gone.” The words are softly spoken, precisely English-accented. “If that. How can she do this much damage in one bloody hour? ”
    This is a rhetorical question.
    â€œCome on,” I say, hefting the samples in my arms up onto the rack, then turning to the nearest mangled heap. “I’ll help.”
    I hear the ghosts of anyone who’s ever lived with me laughing their heads off. Okay, so I’m not exactly known as the Queen of Tidy.
    Just as Sally and I are cleaning up the last of the debris, in this case lipstick-marked coffee cups and full ashtrays, Nikki sweeps in through the doors, swathed in Autumn Haze mink and looking as fresh as three-day-old kuchen. She scans the now-clean room (I’m brought to mind of those insurance commercials where the destruction is undone by running the film backwards), then beams at us as much as the Botox will allow.
    â€œYou two are absolute angels,” she says, sweeping over to me to give me a one-armed hug. “ Angels. I would have straightened up myself later, you know that—”
    Sally and I avoid looking at each other.
    â€œâ€”but I got stuck at lunch with my attorney and time just got away from me. Did you get the suit? Is Harold here? Did my daughter call?”
    â€œYes, I don’t think so, and not that I know of,” I said, wondering why she doesn’t ask Vanessa or Virginia or whatever the hell her name is, since, um, she’s the one paid to answer the phone?
    Harold, by the way, is Nikky’s husband. You’ll undoubtedly meet him later. Lucky you.
    Nikky goes on about whatever it is Nikky goes on about for another thirty seconds or so, then sweeps into the back to assuredly wreak